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More on Twitter during the Australian Election Campaign

Wed, 28/07/2010 - 09:45 — Snurb
Politics
Elections
Twitter

Over on Fairfax’s National Times opinion site, I’ve now posted a first article examining the use of Twitter during the early election campaign – for the first week of campaigning, excluding the debate last Sunday (which I’ve examined on our network mapping blog Mapping Online Publics, here and here).

As with the debate, nothing much to see here yet, but there it is… I’ve also posted up the full original draft of the article at our journalism group Gatewatching.org.

Comments

Mon, 02/08/2010 - 06:16 — Crig Thomler (not verified)

I appreciate that you were published in the broadsheets regarding Twitter use in the first week of the election.

Your article clearly appealed to the reading demographic, however I hope you provide a great deal more depth in your analysis in order to lay claim to any kind of credentials as an effective social media analyst.

There's a lot more going on under the hood in terms of sentiment and views on #ausvotes than you appear to have considered.

Cheers,

Craig

Mon, 02/08/2010 - 19:04 — Snurb

Thanks for that comment, Craig, but with respect, you seem to be conflating some rather disparate points here.

First, the National Times is hardly a broadsheet - it's Fairfax's opinion site, articles from which are also syndicated into the SMH and Age Websites. It's important to keep that in mind when reading those articles.

So, second, the article is what it is - a brief opinion piece outlining some of the basic trends from the first week of #ausvotes on Twitter. A few hundred words of commentary for a general audience isn't exactly the place for deep scholarly analysis.

Third, then, making a link from this to any 'claims as an effective social media analyst' (whatever we might understand that to mean) seems a bit far-fetched to me. You're welcome to judge my credentials by whatever yardstick you choose, of course, but perhaps the scholarly publications available on this site might be a better measure than a few hundred words in an opinion column? Nowhere have I claimed that the National Times article was a comprehensive analysis of #ausvotes activity (and it would be silly to do so) - so I'm not sure why you appear to be reading it that way.

Finally, just to pick up on your "Not the Twitter election": again, who claimed it was?

Where I do agree with you, of course, is that there's a lot more to be said about #ausvotes than I've been able to in my National Times piece. But for the in-depth analysis, you'll just have to wait for our various scholarly articles to come out, after the election... (For a few further quick looks at the data, keep an eye on Mapping Online Publics, too.)

Hope that clears things up.

Axel Bruns

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